Aftab Sultan resigned as the chairman of the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) on Tuesday, he confirmed to Dawn.com.

Sultan was appointed to the post of the head of the anti-corruption watchdog by the incumbent government last year in July after retired Justice Javed Iqbal had relinquished charge as the NAB chairman.

A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office stated that Sultan had presented his resignation to Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif citing personal reasons.

“The prime minister appreciated the services of Mr Aftab Sultan and lauded his honesty and uprightness. Upon his insistence, the prime minister reluctantly accepted the resignation of Mr Sultan,” it added.

Geo News reported that Sultan resigned because he was asked to do “certain things that were unacceptable to me”.

Profile

Aftab Sultan is a law graduate from Punjab University, who later did LLM from the University of Cambridge and also MSc in jurisprudence/legal studies from the University of Edinburgh.

In 2002, as a regional police officer in Sargodha, Sultan refused to assist the administration during the referendum called by then chief executive, retired General Pervez Musharraf. He paid for his defiance when he was made OSD.

He also prepared a 5,000-page report on the directives of the Supreme Court as additional inspector general of police about the famous Bank of Punjab case. The SC had appointed Sultan as the investigation officer after expressing dissatisfaction over the investigations conducted by NAB.

Sultan had retired as the IB head on April 3, 2018, after serving since June 7, 2013.

He served two governments each of the PPP and the PML-N under four prime ministers — Yousuf Raza Gilani, Raja Pervez Ashraf, Nawaz Sharif and Shahid Khaqan Abbasi.